Hey, all, Happy Thanksgiving weekend. It seems only appropriate to now say a few words in honor of the First Nations or American Indians or Native Americans or the [fill in the names of many specific tribes].
A couple of months ago, we released a discussion of American Indian philosophy. Given that we knew nothing at all about this going in, we did our best to be modest about it, and set audience expectations low: This was us PEL guys, with our ongoing PEL project and its recurrent concerns (e.g., the occasional approach to process ontology), trying to get a basic handle on how to approach a mostly oral tradition, and, honestly, try to get a feel for how to use an academic approach to bypass the goofy New Age way that American Indian philosophy has been appropriated by more than a few good-hearted, philosophy-inclined people.
What I did NOT want to do was just to repeat in a slightly different form what we did recently with our “white privilege” and then James Baldwin episodes: We spent the first 20 minutes of our discussion admitting that our relationship as white dudes who don’t personally know any Native folks well made this whole thing problematic, but I felt that the concerns were no more serious from an academic perspective than our attempts to study Confucius, or even Jesus.
As folks subsequently pointed out to us on Twitter and in comments on this blog, thinking “from an academic perspective” with regard to this topic is itself problematic, since this is not, like Confucianism or Christianity, a tradition that turned from oral to written centuries ago and has had whole empires going to bat for it and arguing over various traditions within it. These are living, still oppressed people, and so our treatment should have reflected that, and taken extra care beyond our normal episode procedures to make sure that they were portrayed in a light that they would approve of… which is not to say that being critical wouldn’t have a place, but having a real, living philosopher within this tradition on the show to give us the best possible material available would have been better than what we actually did.
Let me remind those of you who may not have been listening to the show for many years of our intent here at PEL: We try to inspire people to read philosophical works and make them confident enough to form their own opinions about them. In early episodes, I was positively adamant that it doesn’t even matter that you really understand the reading as the author intended it or as scholars understand it (after all, you can always circle back to it later, perhaps with a better guide, to get a more accurate interpretation), but what matters is that you, the reader/listener, have more food for thought and tidbits that you can try to apply to your own life.
So yes, by design, this show is about cultural appropriation, and not necessarily in a respectful way: Heroes like Plato and Kant have been revered too long and too hard, and we now should stop worshipping the dead. What you, a living person, might make of the work of these folks in your actual lives is much more important than some words on paper or the reputations of those long gone. Believe me, I’m aware of how problematic it is to turn this particular attitude away from revered Western figures toward figures from oppressed communities.
In any case, I think we’ve pretty thoroughly gotten over that initial emphasis (which maybe was only mine… certainly not Wes’s), and we normally try to read secondary sources and overall to not misrepresent what we’re talking about. This episode was no exception; I scoured the web and YouTube for anything that would help us approach this respectfully and with what thoroughness we could afford given time constraints. But we’re not experts and have never claimed to me. We hope, still, that there’s something useful to listeners in witnessing our attempts to grasp strange and difficult ideas, even if we ultimately fail.
Thus, we’re not generally too keen on experts. The project exhibits more integrity as a continuous, exhibitionist journey of learning if we don’t have any guests at all (meaning it’s OUR learning, which you’ve been witness to over a long damned time), and when we have guests, we’d almost rather have fellow seekers, and our guest Jim (a former grad student, now a blue collar worker) certainly qualifies.
We occasionally break this rule, but it works best when, as with Law Ware, the professor-guest is a fan of the show and understands how to have a many-person conversation. The average academic does not know how to do this, and most that we bring on to exhibit their own expertise certainly don’t know how to do this, which often necessitates that we have time after their appearance to do our normal discussion and treat the part with them as more or less an audience-observable text, that may not be substantially different than if we just pointed you at one of their existing YouTube lectures. Sure, I think (I hope) we get some good questions in, and we try to get them to relate what they have to say to our ongoing concerns, but, for example, if you listen to Robert Wright on our podcast, you’re still going to get basically the same story that you got if you listened to him on one of the many other podcasts he’s been on recently.
Our recent “Second Opinions” concept (which was suggested by a listener! I don’t recall who) gives us another option: We do our song and dance first, and then we get someone who actually knows what he’s talking about to come correct us. We just did that with Russ Roberts, and I think it worked well. I mean, we were talking at a high enough level of generalization that we didn’t really attempt to critique what we were hearing from him much, but we’d already expressed our deep skepticism about the so-called “free market” in our previous discussion of Adam Smith, and Russ provided a thoughtful counterpoint, which we leave to the audience and our future episodes to cogitate upon further.
Though I had THOUGHT that having Jim on our American Indian philosophy episode would make having this sort of follow-up not really necessary, some of you have voiced the opinion that no, we should really connect directly with a bona fide, publishing, teaching philosopher (or maybe he or she doesn’t go by that academic designation, but someone credentialed), with native heritage, actually living now in this tradition.
I’d be very open to seeing this happen regarding the American Indian philosophy episode. Over Twitter I called upon our critics to suggest some guest names (I asked Jim, too) or volunteer their own expertise, to recommend an additional set of readings and come on the show. Though I received a few suggestions, I didn’t get anyone qualified to commit to the effort of joining us (and really, I don’t blame them; most academics aren’t particularly interested in our little reading group project), and of course, we have many other philosophical interests that pull us this way and that, and so we’ve already recorded on more Nietzsche and are currently engrossed in William James.
Before either of those things happened, I read the entirety of Vine Deloria Jr.’s The Metaphysics of Modern Existence, which had been recommended by multiple listeners. Vine is dead, but I reached out to his son, who was unwilling to appear himself but did clue me in on another possible guest. I ended up not wanting to go in this direction, because, I’m sorry to say, the book was ultimately not something I wanted to force my fellow podcasters to read. I plan to explain this in more detail, seeing as I put in the time reading it, but I’ll just say for the moment that the concluding chapter of the book is an extended rant about how modern philosophers and scientists unjustifiably dismiss astrology. He’s a really great writer, very well read, with some insightful things to say, but too much of the book dwelt on the New Age twaddle of his day ('60s–'70s) and as a theologian (non-Christian, but still), he was caught in struggles like trying to argue for creationism against evolutionary theory that, while fascinating from an intellectual history point of view, would not serve us well if our point in reading him was to exhibit a current Native thinker of unquestionable philosophic integrity.
So, I’m asking you folks who care about this now: We’re not an academic organization or academic publication with all the time in the world to chase down leads on this. If any of you who are actually knowledgeable in this area of thought would like to volunteer yourself or your favorite professor or writer to continue this discussion with us, we’ll consider it.
One thing I found interesting in this case—as opposed to objections we received when we covered polarizing figures like Ayn Rand, or some people didn’t like our initially anti-theological take on Aristotle, or thought we didn’t do justice to Merleau-Ponty or Lacan*, or hated our dismissive attitude toward Stoicism (which we totally made up for by treating it again with Massimo!)—I didn’t actually hear from any of our critics any serious arguments or augmentations regarding the philosophical content of the episode, just complaints that our methodology in doing this wasn’t sufficiently respectful, despite our efforts.
For example, our part 1 (MUCH less interesting, I think, than part 2 of the discussion, where we actually got down to business) spent a lot of time basically trying to figure out how important the supernatural (i.e., superstitious from our point of view) aspects of Native thinking are in figuring out their philosophy. Now, no one objects when we have similar conversations about supernatural elements in Buddhism, but that’s not my point here. In turning to Vine Deloria, Jr., I hoped to find some more sophisticated, non-supernatural take on these ideas of rationality and epistemic openness, but really, I saw virtually the same take on these topics in that book as in what we read and presented: It’s OUR fault as Westerners that we can’t be epistemically humble enough to admit that Native wisdom regarding, for example, the synchronicity of the movements of the heavenly bodies with the workings of human affairs, might actually be true, or (and in what I’m about to say here, Deloria was much more extreme than what we’d read) that Native creation stories might not be more or less literally true. But this “humbleness” echoes all too familiarly the claim of Biblical literalists to admit that science is after all a human creation, and very flawed at that, so maybe the wisdom of the ages should trump it. Instead of saying that our dwelling on superstition was demeaning to modern Native thinkers, I’d like to hear, at least in outline, how what I’ve just said is a misinterpretation, or not representative of some very interesting Native thinkers whose views we ought to share with the world.
As Jim said, maybe they don’t want to share their wisdom with our tin Western ears, and they certainly have no obligation to come on our show. I hope that by having this discussion, flawed as it may have been, we’ve helped inspire interest in this neglected topic. I think that good outweighs any harm we may have done in giving a presentation that doesn’t fit the political specifications of some particular listeners.
One Native listener seemed to appreciate what we did (and was not so sympathetic with our detractors): a Canadian fellow named John Beaubien. He was good enough to give a YouTube response to the episode.
Thanks to John, and thanks to anyone willing to contribute in a positive dialogue about these thorny issues and contribute to the availability to the public of philosophy of any and all stripes.
–Mark Linsenmayer
*OK, I’ll admit it: The Lacan snobs were mostly not very helpful in their critiques either.
I see you people as having a good academic background in traditional Western philosophy, which allows you to pick up a new text and discuss it intelligently. I admire your ability to say something worth listening to every week about complex philosophical texts, for example, a text like Spinoza’s Ethics, which took me about a year of study and rereading, if not more time, to digest and to understand.
I don’t expect you to be able to discuss the wisdom of all human ethnic groupings, in this case, Native-Americans. No one can intelligently talk about all the diverse human cultures and their wisdom without falling into utter superficiality. You’re not Wikipedia and you shouldn’t try to be it.
I believe that you guys should concentrate on texts or on thinkers or on areas of reflection which turn you on or maybe which especially turn you off. That way your listeners will learn what you guys have to say (which is the whole point about listening to you), not about what human beings in every age and in every culture have said, which is impossible for any one person or any four people to make sense of or assimilate.
Well, exactly. …In that the thing that turns us off here is New Age-ism, and I came at Taoism during our first year with the same concern: My own experiment messing around in “philosophy” before getting educated about it. The same people that listen to philosophy podcasts are likely to mess around in these areas, and I was curious re. What all there was in it and whether how scholars talk about it is different than how it shows up in popular philosophical culture. I think the whole venture was very successful from that perspective, and I’m now curious enough about what further depths and/or rigor are available here that I’d be happy to read more, and also curious about the actual political situation that I’ve clumsily waded into. So if we can do one more of these that fulfills those purposes, then great. But I’m not going to do it unless we can do it right. I think some of the other guys don’t feel any need to go further down this path.
Again, we only did this because I ran across someone who seemed like a good guide for us, and I think it unlikely that we’ll do the equivalent for Australian natives or some African tribes unless some listener volunteers to take us on such a journey. My drive to step through all the historical periods of philosophy doesn’t actually extend to exploring every folk tradition the world over. (Though we WILL do some old timey Brahmanism at some point.)
I would just let it go and stick to texts (writ large).
It might be interesting if at one point you people do a episode on New Ageism, that is, one which defines its frontiers, its characteristics, its personality, its cultural goals, its methods, its politics, etc.
I believe that you could do a very good job there and there are very few podcasts which have the intellectual and cultural tools needed to do that.
what would be the philosophical angle?
dmf,
The philosophical angle would be to delimit philosophy from New Ageism. There are those who see New Ageism as “philosophical” because it’s “deep” or “metaphysical”. The idea would be to show the differences between the “philosophy” of Rudolph Steiner (New Age nonsense in my opinion) and that of, say, Plato (who says a lot of stuff that seem nonsensical today after all).
It appears that PEL will enjoy a long life (I applaud that), and it would be useful if the panelists could point to a conversation where they explain what New Ageism is and why they do not consider it to be “philosophy” in the sense that they consider Plato to be “philosophy”. Because from time to time a current of opinion will arise demanding an episode on the “philosophy” of Reiki or of Rudolph Steiner.
Since there are so many kinds of and elements w/in New Age philosophy, I think we’ll likely just keep edging at specific readings w/in it. E.g. maybe Ken Wilbur (Buddhist New Age thinking), Alan Watts (VERY often requested), or Telihard De Chardin (one of the guys that Deloria focuses his discussion on… and one of the most frustrating parts of the Deloria book, because Chardin just sounds like a pile of nonsense).
heh, Chardin is nonsense and the looming figure behind Robert Wright’s evo-babble, I was going to give the same response you did to S.W. that ‘New Age ‘ isn’t one thing and as I said above sticking to the texts seems vital to the PEL mode of inquiry.
Wilbur isn’t worth the effort (nor Watts) but the late Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism might be worth a show or 2:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Bhaskar
I love Watts! Sigh. I suddenly feel like I’m amongst blue bonnets in Texas taking photos of my kids.
I enjoy Watts too but not a philosopher in any systematic way, I think they caught most of his vibe in their Zen/Motorcycle Maintenance podcast, no?
http://www.brautigan.net/graphics/machines/machines-loudspeaker.gif
dmf – that’s awesome. “philosophy is only one of many ways of making meaning in the world, making a life of the world, thankfully not everything of value needs to be rigorous in the same way.
So true.
Hmm – it’s been a while since that one for me! Maybe I’ll relisten! You’re right though – I don’t think of Watts in that philosophical/systematic way.
for me philosophy is only one of many ways of making meaning in the world, making a life of the world, thankfully not everything of value needs to be rigorous in the same way.
https://archive.org/details/ethicswithoutphi00edwa_0
It’s been about 45 years since I read Alan Watts, but I don’t recall him as being New Age. He doesn’t have an alternative (non scientific) metaphysical system to push. His emphasis is basically ethical (in the sense that ethics is about the good life or flourishing). With retrospect, I see him as very innocent, as not taking into account how fucked up, greedy and destructive so many of us are and not realizing how that is not going to change because we meditate for 15 minutes a day. However, he’s typical of the 60’s (and certainly not the worst of the 60’s) in that innocence.
I’m white, but I grew up in an Eskimo village in Alaska. Although I’m a non-Native, I believe I have a reasonably clear understanding of their culture. As I see it, framing their beliefs as ‘philosophy’ is problematic: in general, there isn’t much concern for epistemology, ontology, aesthetics or other major branches of the Western philosophical tradition. By contrast, religion (Christianity) and spirituality is taken VERY seriously, not unlike evangelical Christians – belief is resolute, visceral, physical. That being said, what most stands out I’m my experience is a concrete belief in animism: things have spirits (plants, animals, places). If an ‘outsider’ dismisses this animism as superstitious, pre-scientific, or mere nonsense, it’s impossible to genuinely understand their worldview, and the entire enterprise becomes more akin to sociology or cultural anthropology as opposed to philosophical discourse.
Interestingly, animism isn’t one of the points that we were dismissive of. There’s a whole tradition w/in Western philosophy of insisting that since you can’t get consciousness from the motion of particles (they’re just fundamentally different types of things), then consciousness must be in some sense there from the beginning. That’s back there in some of the Presocratics and in Spinoza through Whitehead, and Chalmers is the current one defending it.
Now, that’s not quite the same as saying we have ethical duties toward a rock, but certainly environmental ethics is a viable alternative to thinking a la Kant that all ethical duty comes from respecting the reasoning capacity of other people.
So the animism part of this was just interesting.
I don’t think we were contending that an entire belief system constitutes a “philosophy,” just like we wouldn’t have an episode on the “philosophy” of the Southern Baptist Church, but that some of their concerns constitute a philosophical challenge to Western schools, the animism maybe being one of these, and certainly relationality and epistemic openness… I think these were pretty evident in our readings and our discussion, even if ultimately we didn’t very well understand what to make of them.
Thank you guys at PEL for all that you do to bring interesting thinkers of all stripes and colors to the podcast. I am of Mexican descent, a lover of philosophy (or in translation a lover of wisdom) and a fan of PEL!
I appreciate the thoughtfulness and critical mindedness you all bring to all subjects and I appreciate when you disagree with something rather than worry about walking on politically correct egg shells. I personally rather hear from your own individual perspectives and perhaps at times imperfect understandings of various forms of thought you may not be too familiar with. Regardless, it’s great to hear the process of learning happening in your discussions amongst yourselves or with your guests and I also benefit in that learning process with you as a listener. As someone who has been listening and supporting your podcast for some time now, I know your intentions of wanting to understand and not misrepresent even when you do not agree with a thinker are genuine and admirable.
I hope you continue to bring more diverse thinkers to your podcast episodes even if you guys potential wade through unsuccessfully. I feel its especially important to bring thinkers who many listeners like myself may not agree with as I think we all grow in our wisdom when we try to understand those who think differently than we do about subjects on economics, race, religion, politics, etc. And thank you John for the video response on the Native American episode. Keep up the good work you guys!
Hear hear.
For what it’s worth, I thought it was a good episode and would appreciate having you guys explore more non-western philosophy on the show.
I agree with the kind sentiments said previously. The closest you could ever have come to covering someone who you thought was hogwash was Rand. And it was obvious that you were aware of your bias going in because you were so charitable that I had a hard time telling exactly what you disagreed with at times in the podcast.
Your intention always comes through, in my opinion, simply by virtue of the fact that you read so thoroughly all the material. And you read additional sources many times. If a listener hasn’t read the material, it may be much more difficult to see how much effort you all put in. However, I sometimes do the reading before the episode and it becomes very clear that one does not do this kind of work just to go on to dismiss something or treat it uncharitably. If I spend all that time trying to figure out WTF these people are trying to say =- I want to know why it has endured in the way it has!
If you hadn’t done this episode, the idea of a philosophy of native americans (apologies that I forget the preferred name) would never cross my path. Many other Native American things such as poetry and ritual I enjoy, but not this specifically. So, fail and then fail better, but you will never please everyone and you can’t start out of the gate with perfect knowledge. This is what learning out loud really looks like and unfortunately it’s under-appreciated.
And Jim, I think you were just great. I would NEVER subject my grad school work to a forum such as this, firstly, and although I didn’t read it, I felt you did an excellent job of explaining things. I sensed your reverence immediately.
Plus, saying a podcast is stupid isn’t nice. Perhaps he was angry. I get that. I just think when people are angry enough to say that – it’s not about you.
This is well written, Mark. I don’t usually find myself in the comments section, but in this situation I’ve always found it hard to grasp the notion that a person (particularly a white/cis-hetero male) simply should abstain from delving into an Indigenous peoples philosophically relevant thought. Of course, if a group of four white, male people educated in Western philosophy are prescriptive and attempt to either put the text/teachings in question into a ‘conceptual box’ to fit a traditional European-philosophical conceptual framework while relegating perceived ‘non-philosophical’ talk to the flames (forgive me, I simply love Hume’s rhetoric) as silly or ignorant of ‘modern’ thinking this would certainly be inappropriate and actually offensive. It is unlikely anyone would explicitly approach the material like this, but one could certainly imagine this group of hypothetical white men falling into this behavior out of habit due to a sort of inherent but unconscious ‘intellectual elitism’.
The difference with this podcast episode, I felt, was the real attempt to grapple with something totally different from the usual philosophical fare on its terms, knowing full well that this attempt is largely futile. Acknowledging that A: We must attempt to grasp this text on its own terms and B: this is quite impossible is, as I see it, a totally legitimate way to go about reading something like this. Are people not familiar with the traditions and thought of a particular group barred from attempting to understand it? Of course not. Will they get to a point of ‘understanding the text’? Of course net, hell, it is difficult to understand the background of a writer within a familiar tradition, let alone one from a totally different society. What will happen is this group of people trying to learn something new will remind themselves of the diversity of human thought, perhaps illuminating their understanding their own way of thinking in a clearer light and possibly, with luck, gaining a new insight that is at least novel, useful and stimulating, even if it is not necessarily the message the writer or thinker was attempting to convey.
Still, one legitimate criticism is the lack of an actual Native American thinker. The problem, as you mentioned though, is a dearth of people in this field and the difficulty in finding someone to join in the discussion. At the very least, if I remember correctly, your guest did explicitly confer with an Indigenous person from this tradition regarding this podcast to attain a better understanding of what kind may be an appropriate way to handle this subject matter. This may be insufficient for some, but just because a situation isn’t ideal for total clarity and sensitivity of a subject doesn’t mean one should refrain from exploring the subject. Rather, one should approach it with the mindset previously stated: We can, and should, study the works of other cultures without ever gaining, let’s call it, an ‘authentic’ understanding, in a way that a person from that group might have.
I would encourage you guys to keep exploring other interesting traditions to discuss while attempting to bring in people who are knowledgeable with it, preferably someone actually from that culture. Stay the course, this is the best Podcast out there.